Starting in early March, the platform will place every account into a default “teen-appropriate” experience unless it has proof that users are adults.
The move has brought widespread criticism from Discord users, who are citing privacy and security concerns following a recent breach of a third-party vendor that ended up exposing around 70,000 government ID images used to verify the age of Discord users.
Don’t threat
Speaking as someone who is currently planning to move a community away from Discord to something self-hosted, it’s not as easily said as done.
Apart from the need to run your own infrastructure, competing software is typically finicky and comes with caveats. Plus you have to worry about discoverability if you want to attract new users.
It’s doable, sure, but it requires a lot of planning and work. Honestly, it’s probably going to take us months to get our own service fully up and running.
Setting up Matrix/Synapse was extremely easy and done in a day. The self hosting part is not that hard and I would say migrating users would be the majority of your time. Plenty of VPSs online make obtaining infrastructure very easy.
It’s never easy but believe me it’s rewarding. Planning to switching to a self-hosted solution even more so (though it’s harder). However, starting it is the halfway through. I just wish your community members as understanding as you.
Good luck!
They won’t. They never leave, at least not enough to make a difference. I’ve long since given up hoping in people to do the right thing.
I run several communities on discord with hundreds of people in them. I can’t just leave.
I want to leave. but I can’t force people to move to a new app just for one community.
its a complicated issue for those that use it for communities. we are working on trying to move off.
Who could have seen this coming?
Thats the problem. You can go through all the pain to move to an alternative, but eventually it enshitifys too. You could go open source, but those solutions rarely have the polish to get the large quantity of users needed for niche communities. And most users won’t understand why they are better anyway. So it’s just a horrible cycle.
Since the 90s every few years you have had to move. You get over it eventually. There will be stragglers that will always hold on to the old one, they will be the last to the new platform. It’s happened before and it will happen again.